The Animal Question

An eccentric sausage lady, and a wolf poacher

A couple of meaty items in today's Seattle Times (as of this month, our only daily newspaper):

Rebecca Teagarden offers a pithy but poetic tribute to Dorothy Oberto, of sausage fame.

A ranch family near Twisp is under investigation for allegedly poaching a grey wolf. I'm sure it's tearing them apart, and that they'll bear the ire of many a wolf lover, but it's hard to feel sorry for them. The pelt was discovered when a FedEx worker saw blood leaking from a package and refused to accept it (they were trying to mail it to Canada), and police found a photo of the rancher's son (who claims to have killed the wolf) holding up the dead wolf, the photo showing the tell-tale foot injury of an animal caught by a trap. Not exactly Fair Chase doctrine.

Cat cuisine, and I'm not talking about Meow Mix

Of course the most interesting recent development on the animal-rights front lines came recently in the form of a nearly 80-year-old former helpmate to Mao Tse-tung, who staged a protest against the Guandong practice of eating cats. According to the L.A. Times, Lu Di formed China's Small Animal Protection Association, through which she attempts to halt a dietary practice she calls "a crime that humiliates all Chinese people."

The prospect of eating cat is distasteful to those in the U.S., even to the most intrepid of stomachs. Even the Weird Meat crew -- which has consumed everything from ant extract to yak flesh -- has yet to opt for feline, although placenta has made the cut, and with dog meat on the list, cat can't be too far behind.

That 'meat' you're eating was once an animal

I was mulling over names for this blog, all of them variations using the word "meat." A couple of years ago, I wrote something called Meat: A Memoir, so it had to be "meatmatters.com" (taken), "meatyoueat.com" (redundant, and too easily confused with a porn site), or "themeatquestion.com." I'd settled on the latter but decided to sleep on it.

I woke up this morning realizing that I'd taken the animals out of the equation. What I mean is, once an animal becomes "meat," it's edible. Call it the semantics of cognitive dissonance. In order to make Lulubelle the cow mentally digestible, she must become meat.